HOPE COLLEGE SPERA

SPOTLIGHT ON FACULTY RESEARCH AND SCHOLARLY WORK | 2020 | ON FOUR CONTINENTS, HELPING AGENCIES ENCOURAGE FOSTER CARE DEB STURTEVANT, Ph.D. | PROFESSOR OF SOCIAL WORK

Dr. Deb Sturtevant’s “on the side” takes her quite a distance. Guatemala. China. Romania. Zambia. Since the 1990s, she’s worked on projects with the global arm of Bethany Christian Services. In a six-year effort in Zambia that wrapped up in 2015, she and colleagues evaluated a community-based family support program and networked with a local agency and church to improve children’s well-being and support development of community resources to keep families intact.

When I went to Zambia the first time in 2009, the sub-Saharan HIV rate was“ huge; we were looking at life, death, survival. The Christian Alliance for Children in Zambia operated a crisis care clinic for kids who were abandoned in ditches, bus stations, etc. They were brought to the clinic by police or local people who found them. We worked with the agency to evaluate its existing program, to propose improvements and to encourage them to develop a local foster care program. We realized extended families — aunties, grandparents — or foster parents would keep children in families and reduce the number of children in orphanages.

In countries where people in dire poverty have been in survival mode, it’s interesting to be in conversations with social workers and church members and encourage them to think differently about what it means to be a family. Orphan care might keep kids alive, but it doesn’t provide all they need to become productive members of society nearly as well as having a family does. Every child deserves a family. ”

Photo by Steven Herppich

Hope College SPER A 38 39 Hope College SPER A | VOLUME 3 |

Hope College’s motto, SPERA IN DEO, means “Hope in God.”

VICE PRESIDENT FOR PUBLIC TABLE OF CONTENTS AFFAIRS AND MARKETING JENNIFER FELLINGER

EDITOR 8 18 ANN SIERKS SMITH CODE / CUSTOM LAYOUT and DESIGN DECODE BLENDS SAMANTHA BRUIN Constructing and Interdisciplinary REBECCA VAN DYKE ’96 ROBRAHN deciphering meaning projects CONTRIBUTING WRITERS JOSH BISHOP manages web content at Hope College and writes for various publications.

EVA DEAN FOLKERT ’83 28 38 writes extensively about Hope people, MICRO CULTURAL ENTERPRISES CURRENTS research, sports and news. Exploring Analyzing changes JIM MCFARLIN ’74 is an award-winning writer, critic and the unseen world across time and place blogger, and a Hope College Trustee.

NATASHA STRYDHORST writes research-focused stories in sundry scientific spheres.

48 CONTR IBUTING HIGHLIGHTED PHOTOGRAPHER 2019 BOOKS & STEVEN HERPPICH CONFERENCE is a commercial photographer for clients in higher education and healthcare. LEADERSHIP

Spera is an annual PUBLIC AFFAIRS NOTICE OF NONDISCRIMINATION publication highlighting AND MARKETING Hope College seeks to be a community that affirms the dignity of all research, writing and 616.395.7860 persons as bearers of God’s image. It is Hope College policy not to other creative work by [email protected] discriminate on the basis of age, color, disability, family status, genetic the Hope College faculty. hope.edu information, height, national origin, pregnancy, race, religion, sex, or © 2020 Hope College weight, except in the event of a bona fide occupational qualification. February 2020

Dear Friends,

Welcome to Spera 2020!

As an alumnus of Hope College, it is a particular pleasure to introduce this year’s issue of Spera. Now in its third year, this publication shares stories of faculty research, scholarship and creative performance at Hope.

Like so many graduates of Hope College, I experienced transformational mentorship from my professors — across all disciplines. In their everyday work, they guided me through rigorous academics, connected me to an amazing internship, supported me in my journey toward graduate school and prepared me for a career that ultimately would lead me back to this beloved campus. Now, as president of Hope College, I find special joy in the opportunity to work alongside the very people who always brought out the best in me.

In 2019, U.S. News & World Report ranked Hope #48 among all liberal arts colleges in the country for “Best Undergraduate Teaching” — a reflection of our “unusually strong commitment to teaching.” Our faculty are not only exceptional teachers, though; they are excellent scholars, too. Also in 2019, Hope continued its streak of placing on the U.S. News & World Report list for “Outstanding Undergraduate Research / Creative Project Opportunities.” Hope earned a ranking of #23, tying with Cornell and keeping company with schools like Yale, Stanford, MIT, Princeton and Northwestern.

How is it that Hope College receives this kind of recognition year after year? When you read this issue of Spera, you’ll understand. You’ll discern the great passion that our faculty have for research — a passion that they share with their students. It’s a passion that stays with Hope alumni after graduation. Indeed, in my first year as president, I have met many young alumni now in graduate school, eager to share how they stand apart from their peers, thanks to the “graduate-level undergraduate experience” they received from their professors at Hope.

Together, Hope faculty and students pursue truth, knowledge and beauty in all its forms, and in doing so, take part in a pursuit of God. They bring life to Hope’s motto, “Spera in Deo” — the inspiration for the title of this publication.

I hope you enjoy reading the stories in Spera 2020! And, I invite you to read more stories about faculty research, scholarship and creative work throughout the year at blogs.hope.edu/stories-of-hope.

Sincerely,

Matthew A. Scogin President

5 Hope College SPER A DEANS’ COUNCIL 2019–2020

Cady Short-Thompson, Ph.D. Provost

Shonn Colbrunn, M.A. Deirdre Johnston, Ph.D. Executive Director of the Interim Associate Dean for Boerigter Center for Calling Global Education and Career

Carol De Jong, B.A. Scott VanderStoep, Ph.D. Dean for Academic Services Dean for Social Sciences and Registrar

Gerald Griffin,Ph.D. David Van Wylen, Ph.D. Associate Provost for Dean for Natural and Academic Affairs Applied Sciences

Kelly Jacobsma, M.L.I.S. Sandra Visser, Ph.D. Genevra Thome Begg Dean Dean for Arts and of Libraries Humanities

6 INTERDISCIPLINARY EXPLORATION OF GLOBAL ISSUES

An innovative Hope College initiative enabled 50 faculty members to travel internationally in teams over the past 18 months to interact with scholars in other nations about complex global problems.

“The impact on faculty is just tremendous,” says Dr. Deirdre Johnston, interim associate dean for global education, who co-directed the Hope Portals to the World program with Dr. Annie Dandavati, professor of political science. “I believe that absolutely every academic discipline has a need to engage with how globalization is changing what we have taught in that discipline.”

The Portal to the World twist has been for faculty from a mix of disciplines to go abroad together following a semester of reading about and discussing their team’s focus and the history, politics and economy of the nation they would visit, sharing perspectives informed by their academic fields.

Many returned to Michigan with strengthened networks for collaborative research and globally connected courses.

For instance, Dr. Phillip Rivera has a grant proposal underway with a fellow biologist in Ecuador. Psychologist Dr. Alyssa Cheadle plans to trade data with a sociologist and an economist in India to broaden her research sample for investigation of religiousness and well- being. Mathematician Dr. Airat Betmetjev gained new insight from researchers in China, which he’s leveraging for computationally complex tasks in his work on statistical projects.

Hope Portal to the World study travel was underwritten by a grant from the Great Lakes Colleges Association Global Crossroads program, which is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The initiative concludes this semester with the final team’s participation in a Paris conference on the Armenian genocide. All told, 11 teams will have visited 11 nations on four continents to explore issues ranging from scientific research to human embodiment through sport and art.

Learn more at spera.hope.edu/portal-program

7 Hope College SPER A | CODE / DECODE |

Streamlining Robotic Coding MIGUEL ABRAHANTES, Ph.D. | PROFESSOR OF ENGINEERING

In a Hope College engineering laboratory, a roomful of he hopes to streamline the process so that the data Roombas® — or more accurately, Kobuki mobile robots handling becomes more efficient and reliable. (shaped like the popular Roomba vacuums, but with no cleaning power) — are carrying on earthbound research His current exploration was launched by NASA. that grew out of knowledge a professor acquired while For 10 years beginning in 2006, Abrahantes’ research working on other robots intended for space exploration. included projects with the federal agency’s scientists. He spent two summers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight And if the work succeeds, Dr. Miguel Abrahantes will Center in Maryland, collaborating on a fellowship- have landed upon, among other discoveries, a strategy funded project with a team of professors from across to significantly reduce the amount of computer power the country who specialize in various areas of robotics. and processing needed to operate multiple robots “My focus was controlled robotics,” Abrahantes says. simultaneously. “That’s my Ph.D. area, control systems.”

The “smart navigation systems” in 21st-century cars Having organized a student robotics group at Hope in require massive amounts of data to operate, Abrahantes 2004 shortly after his arrival on campus, Abrahantes notes. For coordination of multiple robots’ activity, often brought his prized pupils along for the experience.

CODE / DECODE 8 When funding expired for that program and NASA Hope students have been assisting him with the turned its attention elsewhere, he applied the implementation from the beginning. “The students knowledge he had absorbed to his current endeavor. have actually taken to this project more than I have,” he beams. “What NASA wanted to do was create a robot that, instead of having wheels, would just tumble along,” In the summer of 2019, computer science major he explains. “You could send it to the surface of places Brandon Maurice ’20 served as Abrahantes’ assistant. like Mars or the moon and the wheels would not be a “It’s really piquing my interest in wanting to go into problem getting stuck on the floor of the planet while the engineering field in terms of programming,” exploring.” Maurice says. And that interest may have been further sweetened by the project’s raspberry pies. “My part was just the programming side of it, but after I came back I built one with students. This idea has many Just kidding. Not that kind. Raspberry Pi’s. pieces that are similar.” (Raspberry Pi is the model name of a bare-bones “This idea” involves a fleet of autonomous robots processing unit without keyboard or screen, that could be programmed to work together or manufactured by Bluetooth SIG, Inc.) independently, depending upon the circumstances. As the project got underway, the Kobuki robots — each “You’ll have robots that will be navigating in a one named by a student for one of the Teenage Mutant coordinated way,” Abrahantes says, “and need to share Ninja Turtles — were carrying, like turtle shells, laptop information and do different tasks.” In summer 2019 computers connected by a secure network to a desktop and during his sabbatical in the fall that followed, unit. Abrahantes rigged the laptop computers to the he equipped the robots for test runs with various robots so he and his students could control the robots’ numbers and combinations of sensors. By assessing movements by keystrokes. the responsiveness and accuracy of these different assortments, he hopes to find the “less-is-more” Later, Maurice replaced the laptops with Raspberry Pi sweet spot that delivers strong results with the units. “With Raspberry Pi’s the possibilities are endless minimum number of sensors, and hence to work in in terms of what you can do with technology,” he says. the coding to deliver the minimal amount of processing “It’s awesome.” needed to coordinate the work of multiple units. Barring complications, Abrahantes hopes to take the Unlike robots that are tasked with, say, dismantling computer-topped robots, rigged also with cameras that bombs, these units would not necessarily have a human will enable them to maneuver around objects, out of the operator controlling their every move. They would be lab and into the field early this year. programmed once, and then set out to perform specific functions independently or as a team. One of his goals is to minimize the sensing capabilities in the communications. “How simple can you have the “You can imagine a group of robots that would be system that can do the tasks?” he asks rhetorically. cooperating in disaster relief, in urban areas, rescues ­— “As you add capabilities, it becomes more and more also military applications,” Abrahantes suggests. complicated, but one approach is trying to reduce the “In areas where it’s hard to communicate. But they amount of data required. Instead of having 10 sensors, can be responding by themselves at different points.” see if it can be done with two or three.” — By Jim McFarlin | Photo, Steven Herppich His goal, he says, is “to start implementing this hardware and software, putting them together and See the robots in action at adding sensors and the communication capabilities. spera.hope.edu/abrahantes-robots Then we’ll start studying the algorithms — how they communicate and navigate autonomously.”

9 Hope College SPER A A Gothic Church, a Holy Tear

ANNE HEATH, Ph.D. | ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY

Jesus wept. And for seven centuries, a Benedictine challenging the centuries-old notion of how and where abbey church in France claimed to have preserved the that relic was enshrined within the Gothic structure. tear he shed. Her research requires searching through page upon Dr. Anne Heath doesn’t challenge the belief that the page of French and Latin documents — some dating Abbey of La Trinité (the Holy Trinity) in Vendôme once back to the 13th century and earlier — and looking at maintained and venerated a tear that Jesus cried at countless examples of medieval art in France and in the tomb of Lazarus, as described in John 11. But she is collections around the world. “So much has been lost

CODE / DECODE over the centuries,” Heath says. “You have to be willing She reasons that since pilgrims would have traveled to sift through an enormous amount of incomplete, en masse to be blessed by the Holy Tear, there must imperfect evidence if you want to understand the visual have been a place at the abbey for them to encounter culture of the Middle Ages. You’ve got to take whatever this relic of Christ’s body. The shrine, now lost, was evidence survives and think, What questions can I ask an artwork in its own right that complemented the with this?” presentation of the Holy Tear with imagery relating to the Holy Tear’s history and meaning. Historians have If trying to pinpoint the placement of a relic in an abbey documented where the shrine was kept in the 1500s, doesn’t fit your notion of “art history,” consider Heath’s but Heath believes it resided elsewhere in La Trinité’s perspective. She is equally interested in medieval earlier history. “I think that when it was first installed architecture and art objects, and in how people related in the 13th century, it was placed near a spring that to them long ago. was part of the abbey’s origin story. The monks “It’s much more interesting when you can imagine a wanted to connect this prestigious Christ-relic with viewer response to medieval objects in the place they their local place.” were originally intended for,” she says. “I tell students Hope art major Emily Lindbloom ’20 accompanied in my Introduction to Art History class, ‘I’m an art Heath to France in mid-2019 to photograph the abbey historian, but I’m really interested in people.’ I want and make reconstructive drawings based on Heath’s to know what they experienced in a space, looking archival research and tracking of archaeological traces at a work of art. How did people engage with it? in La Trinité and comparable shrines in other French What did it mean to them?” abbeys. “Being together in Vendôme was so helpful “Most medieval spaces are gone or have been because I could show Emily exactly where I thought significantly altered over time,” she laments. “Through the shrine was, and she could see the space and the detective work — like going to a place and trying to evidence firsthand that I’d been telling her about over reconstruct its medieval manifestation from whatever the past two years,” Heath says. remains — I can begin to understand what it might have She is publishing two articles about this project and been like for communities and individuals to encounter will fold them into a book she’s writing about the abbey. works of art. I can’t really recreate that, of course. But Her ongoing research in France is enriched by her I can take ideas or social relationships and think about participation in a “monastic roundtable” of scholars at how they played out in a space. That’s what got me into Reid Hall in Paris, one of Columbia University’s global medieval art history.” engagement centers. “We’re a group of medievalists The Abbey of La Trinité was consecrated in 1040 and from Europe and America,” Heath says, “musicologists, rebuilt between the 13th and 16th centuries. Today the historians, art historians, all sharing our research at French consider it a national historical monument. The different stages, which has been really helpful.” Holy Tear, however, was less fortunate. “It lasted until Gothic structures like La Trinité, Heath says, “are part 1803,” Heath says. “Then it was lost — likely thrown of a grand continuum. They are born of an architectural away because its authenticity was no longer believed.” language that captures the imagination so that we still According to legend, the Holy Tear — a drop of water care very deeply about them. The 2019 fire at Notre- encased in a rock crystal ball — was transported from Dame in Paris is an example of this. There’s something the Holy Land by the monastery’s founders, Count special about Gothic structures — even Dimnent Geoffrey Martel and Agnes of Burgundy. In antiquity, Chapel. It’s revival Gothic architecture, but I tell my rock crystal was more precious than gemstones. “It is students the architect, William K. Johnston, also sat hard and as clear as glass; it’s incorruptible. It was the in an art history class long ago. Why do you think he perfect material to be associated with Christ,” Heath chose Gothic architecture for Hope’s chapel? Because explains. “Pilgrims would come and press the Holy Tear it has meaning as being spiritual, ethereal and eternal. on their eyes. It was well known for curing blindness It radiates.” — By Jim McFarlin | — which is a physical ailment, but in the Middle Ages, Photos, Emily Lindbloom ’20 and Dr. Anne Heath people believed it could have been caused by a soul See more of the abbey church at lacking faith.” spera.hope.edu/heath-abbey-church

11 Hope College SPER A Decoding Mitochondrial Transcription

KRISTIN DITTENHAFER-REED, Ph.D. | ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY

Well beyond the reach of unaided sight lies the genesis of energy we use every day to lift a cup of coffee, climb a mountain or twitch an eyelid. That is, we do when our cells are functioning properly. Many cases in which they’re not can be tied back to the specialized compartments in our cells that produce our energy: mitochondria.

“Name a disease,” Dr. Kristin Dittenhafer-Reed declares, “and I’ll tell you why the mitochondria is important for that disease.” That’s an overstatement, she immediately confesses — but not by much. Metabolism is fundamental to cellular function, and she calls mitochondria “the central metabolic hubs in our cells.”

These hubs accomplish their work via transcription and translation — reading the contents of DNA and turning them into physical products (proteins), machines the cell uses for innumerable functions, including processing nutrients into usable energy. Both the nucleus (the “brain” of the cell) and mitochondria (colloquially known as the “powerhouse” of the cell) contain, transcribe and translate DNA. Dittenhafer-Reed is investigating one protein involved in mitochondrial DNA’s transcription phase, an “unzipper” that separates DNA’s strands before the sequence is copied. She hopes to identify how this protein is regulated to modulate energy production.

“Transcription goes from blueprint to a piece of the blueprint,” Dittenhafer-Reed explains — like zooming in on the plan for a doorway from that for the entire house. “Translation goes from the blueprint to building the actual thing.” Creating another layer of complexity are chemical tags added to a protein after it is made. Like adding a mail slot to a door, these post-translational modifications can alter protein function.

“It’s well-established that these modifications play a major role in regulating transcription in the nucleus,” Dittenhafer- Reed says. “We want to know whether this mechanism also exists in the mitochondria. The goal of my lab is to shed light on unexplored biochemical processes at work in the mitochondria.”

Her research draws on an arsenal of grants and previous findings. Dittenhafer-Reed is a Towsley Scholar, and through this Hope College program she’s receiving research funds and dedicated research time over four years. Her project is also midway through a three-year, $207,900 National Science Foundation grant. At the 2019 American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology annual meeting, she and student research assistants presented their findings to date — an experience that united Dittenhafer-Reed’s loves of teaching and researching as a Christian scientist.

“By exploring the intricate details of creation, you become more in awe of God,” Dittenhafer-Reed reflects. “To think that God created something so complex is amazing to me.” — By Natasha Strydhorst | Photo, Steven Herppich

CODE / DECODE 12 Software Development as Community Outreach

MICHAEL JIPPING, Ph.D. | PROFESSOR OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

If you’re asked to imagine a “life-changing” app — go ahead, try it — do you flash back several summers to Pokémon Go, the sensation that pulled thousands outdoors to re-experience the world around them?

Dr. Mike Jipping is proving that an app need not be flashy or viral to profoundly, positively alter lives.

He’s working through a steady stream of projects to improve the lives of people with cognitive impairments — by coding apps. For each app, his goal is to make the life of at least one person at least a little easier.

Finding students who share this vision has been easy. Participants in the Hope Software Institute (HSI), the Department of Computer Science’s student-faculty collaborative research program, have teamed with him on several coding projects. “They want to do software development that affects peoples’ lives and makes folks more independent,” Jipping says. “They don’t want to write an app to play a game on your phone, but to help somebody live a better life.”

In recent years, Jipping and students have created a number of products for people who needed assistance an app could provide. To help a part-time Hope student use Holland’s local bus system, which a spatial processing disorder made hard for him, they coded MAXTracks in the summer of 2014. Articulus, a Chrome extension that simplifies the reading level of web pages, was developed for Black River High School students stumped by advanced language on websites they consulted for schoolwork. In 2016, HSI students developed Bilancio for iOS, which helps people with cognitive impairments budget their money effectively. (They updated it for Android in 2018.) Jipping provides the apps to users at no charge.

In 2019, he began developing an app to help people initiate or join a conversation with an acquaintance. It will remind them of details from prior conversations. “This is for folks with impairments, but it’s also for me,” Jipping says, setting the scene. “You show up at a party, or you meet someone on the sidewalk, and you start a conversation with them — and you’re trying like crazy to remember who they are.” This app, still in development, would identify the acquaintance’s voice, locate it in the phone’s database and pull up his or her name and relevant details. The final hurdle in the project will be to code the app to separate and identify the voices of multiple speakers in a conversation.

“I think that if I can use technology to make peoples’ lives better, that’s what God wants me to do with my ability,” Jipping asserts. “This is not just writing something to prove that it can be done; it’s writing something to make someone live better, to overcome obstacles and barriers. Technology can do that — and do it well.” — By Natasha Strydhorst | Photo, Steven Herppich

13 Hope College SPER A Translating Classical Latin, Decoding Gender and Power

STEPHEN MAIULLO, Ph.D. | ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF CLASSICS

Converting one language into another isn’t just a tongue — a rarity for a woman of that day. She utilitarian task; a good translator conveys the voice employed it to correspond with two prominent Dutch and linguistic nuances of the person whose words are men, theologian and educator André Rivet and poet and being translated. But what if you are a 21st-century diplomat Constantijn Huygens. Van Schurman’s thesis, man translating the writings of a 17th-century woman? in Latin, to them: that women should be allowed to What challenges does a modern man encounter when receive a formal education. Would they help? decoding the thoughts and words of an early modern “When she writes to Rivet, her Latin is so hard to read woman who had to navigate the gendered power because she is twisting herself in knots in order to play structures of her day? a modesty game,” explains Mauillo. “Her Latin is always Dr. Stephen Mauillo knows the feeling. And now, he crisp, and it’s always in the classical style of Seneca knows those of Anna Maria van Schurman, too. or Cicero. She has to prove that she has the education to play with the boys. Still, she knows that what she is For an upcoming book with Hope Senior Research doing is transgressive.” Professor Dr. Anne Larsen, in 2019 Maiullo completed the translation into English of more than 100 Aware that she must keep asking men for their handwritten letters and poems by van Schurman, a permission to be intellectual, van Schurman plays Dutch intellectual who lived from 1607 to 1678. Does their mind game to prove that she is. her name ring a bell? Probably not. Yet, she is precisely “She does this by quoting, in Latin, the Roman poet the kind of woman you wish you had learned more about Catullus,” describes Mauillo. “In her second letter to in history class — worthy not just of a mention, but a Rivet, Anna Maria writes, ‘I’m working on this little prominent role in a textbook chapter on “Accomplished book.’ Little book is a phrase Catullus uses in his first Women of the 1600s.” At a time when women were poem to describe his poetry. Then she says, ‘It’s nothing expected to be aesthetically seen and not intellectually but trifles,’ another phrase that Catullus uses in his heard, her intelligence and determination could not be dedication to describe his poetry. And finally, she says, contained. In the Netherlands in 1636, she became the ‘I’m writing in French, a charming and elegant language’ first European woman to receive a college education. — a third phrase that Catullus uses. So, she’s coding her Chronicling van Schurman’s life is a long-term project knowledge of the classics for him.” for Larsen, who retired from teaching French at Hope While Maiullo’s knowledge of classical Latin drove his College in 2016, the same year the publisher Routledge translation work, he says that empathy and imagination issued her biography of van Schurman, ‘The Star of Utrecht’: The Educational Vision and Reception also were important tools for decoding subtexts. He and Larsen have far more letters at their disposal that were of a Savante. In this second book, Larsen pairs her written by van Schurman than by Rivet or Huygens, understanding of 17th-century European cultures and and they have no way of knowing what passed between vernacular languages with Maiullo’s fluency in classical van Schurman and each of the men when they met in Latin to decipher oblique messages that van Schurman person. How might missing letters and conversations wove through her writing. lost to history have influenced and undergirded their A speaker of 14 languages, an artist, a poet and a epistolary “chats”? philosopher, van Schurman wanted to extend her “It’s like when you are in a restaurant and hear only one education — and knew she needed men’s help to do side of a phone conversation,” says Maiullo. “You don’t so. Latin was the scholarly language then, the lingua really know who’s on the other end, or what’s being franca, and she wrote immaculately in that ancient

CODE / DECODE 14 said, or what the words even mean. They’re all familiar words, but people use them with one another in ways that are not in dictionaries sometimes.”

As far as Mauillo and Larsen can tell, van Schurman could not convince Rivet of her thesis. As for Huygens, he seems to have pursued an unrequited romantic relationship with this woman of wealthy means. “In fact, Huygens wrote about Anna Maria in a letter to another correspondent that is rife for a #MeToo complaint,” Maiullo says.

Which made Mauillo feel sympathetic and apologetic, not just once but often.

“Here I am, a male scholar educated in the classical tradition, not unlike all of these men whose world she was trying to break into. But in the 21st century,” he reflects, “this actually might be the right thing to do — to have male scholars study women in history. I’ve been living in this woman’s brain for the last seven years, trying to understand what it might be like to live on the margins. I can’t say that I know exactly what it’s like to be this woman in her circumstances, but her world has opened up to me.”

Mauillo plans to continue his scholarship on van Schurman’s writing. He and Larsen will soon start to translate her Opuscula — a collection of letters and poems — from Latin and French to English for the first time. — By Eva Dean Folkert | Photo, Steven Herppich

View one of van Schurman’s letters at spera.hope.edu/ maiullo-letter

15 Hope College SPER A STRIVING FOR BALANCE IN ZEELAND, MICHIGAN MAUREEN DUNN, Ph.D. | PROFESSOR OF KINESIOLOGY KIRK BRUMELS, Ph.D. | PROFESSOR OF KINESIOLOGY

When an elderly person falls, a cascade of medical problems may follow. So when a cluster of falls occurred in 2019 in the assisted living section of a West Michigan senior community, staff asked Hope’s Department of Kinesiology for advice. Dr. Maureen Dunn and Dr. Kirk Brumels teamed with physical therapist Dr. David Krombeen ’12 to design a balance intervention program. In a trial run this winter, some residents are sticking with the facility’s existing fitness classes while another group does balance-building exercises guided on-site by a Hope kinesiology major. Brumels and Dunn will assess the outcomes to inform program design going forward.

Dr. Dunn: Our goal is to include tasks that have been shown previously to improve“ balance. One thing that improves balance is to stand. Moving your eyes and head can also improve balance, and that can be done seated. Exercise of this sort may prove beneficial to residents of the senior community who are living independently, too, as a preventive program.

Dr. Brumels: To maintain balance, we not only require physical strength, but we must be able to effectively process sensory, visual, auditory and positional feedback. If someone’s walking and a sound or a sight startles them or they quickly change positions, how are they able to maintain balance? The program challenges participants in all of those areas, and then we will put them together into activities of daily living and functional movements and hopefully improve balance. Good balance is not something you can get too much of. ”

Photo by Steven Herppich Hope College SPER A | CUSTOM BLENDS |

How Sanctification Works

ANGELA CARPENTER, Ph.D. | ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF RELIGION

“From the moment of birth the human person is In short, there are two perspectives about how moral becoming.” formation actually works: that it’s entirely from the outside, a gift of grace divorced from human effort; Responsive This first line of Dr. Angela Carpenter’s or that it springs entirely from within, dependent on Becoming: Moral Formation in Theological, human will to form new habits and muscle one’s way Evolutionary, and Developmental Perspective into virtuous maturity. sets up an interdisciplinary exploration of how we go about “becoming.” Carpenter is quick to clarify that she doesn’t see her project as anti-virtue. “There are aspects of virtue that One essential element is moral formation, and it’s this I do find really helpful in thinking about Christian aspect of the human experience that Carpenter focuses ethics and transformation,” she says. Rather, she sees on in her 2019 book published by T&T Clark as part of it as “a sort of shift in the center of gravity.” its Enquiries in Theological Ethics series. “Sanctification is a work of God’s grace, yes,” she says “In terms of theological discourse and in Christian — “but it also takes place in a human person. So how ethics, most people who talk about moral formation can we bring these two together?” are talking about virtue ethics,” Carpenter says. Fewer scholars are talking about sanctification, which “When you really dive in and look at what sanctification Carpenter admits is “an old-fashioned word” for a is in the nuts and bolts, it actually, I think, is something doctrine which teaches, from a Reformed perspective, that fits more in our sense of who we are, as human that “our moral transformation — our transformation beings, than we would have anticipated before. The into the image of Christ — is a work of God’s grace.” doctrine of sanctification has something to contribute that virtue theory deemphasizes, or doesn’t contribute.” Carpenter suspects that scholarly and Christian discomfort with the doctrine of sanctification stems In Responsive Becoming, Carpenter looks at three from the apparent mysteriousness of the concept, and influential theologians: John Calvin, John Owen a misunderstanding of the Holy Spirit as something and Horace Bushnell. But because moral formation similar to “a fairy godmother waving a wand.” From cannot be divorced from human nature and human this errant (but common) perspective, sanctification transformation, she takes an interdisciplinary approach “takes place apart from our sense of our lives and who to thinking deeply about who we are as human persons. we are in our communities.” Her book includes findings of evolutionary If this conception of sanctification as something that anthropology, which she characterizes as a way of happens to us isn’t entirely correct, though, neither is thinking about the history of how humans change over virtue ethics, which attributes moral transformation to time, and hence a source of insights about who we a person’s own agency, through a process of habituation. are today. She integrates developmental psychology, As Carpenter expresses it, “I might not feel like doing too, and finds in it a particularly helpful model for the the right thing right now, but if I can just force myself formation of children through their parents’ care. to do the right thing over and over and over again, “I noticed a striking similarity between the way I’m going to instill a new habit. I’m going to become John Calvin talks about sanctification and the way a new person."

CUSTOM BLENDS 18 developmental theorists who are engaging a lot of Templeton Foundation. Her book in progress has the the evolutionary research are talking about human working title Social Ethics and Graced Identity and is formation,” she says. under contract with Baker Academic. — By Josh Bishop | Photo, Steven Herppich Carpenter sums up theologians' shared understanding like this: “Human formation is relational, and it is grounded in love.”

“Calvin talks about the core of sanctification as the recognition that God is a loving father,” she says. “Developmental psychologists have really emphasized the early stability of the parent-child relationship as crucial for everything that follows. If children don’t receive the care, stability and unconditional love that they need early on, that sets up a really bad life trajectory.”

A child’s development into mature adulthood is among the clearest examples of this sort of relational context for moral formation, in which the child “becomes” in response to the love of others. In this way, Carpenter notes, we can begin to see how sanctification is not something that simply happens to us, from outside of us — but takes place within the context of a meaningful and loving relationship.

“What Calvin is describing in sanctification is essentially a life that’s transformed through fellowship with God in Christ. This is something that is not entirely mysterious (though when we are talking about God we are always talking about mystery to some extent). But it is intelligible or recognizable as a human process,” Carpenter says.

“Sanctification is not something that’s passive, where God does everything and the human person just sits here and does nothing. It’s relational. It’s responsive.”

Carpenter has begun another book from an interdisciplinary perspective; she’s building on some of the same ideas to consider the relationship between social ethics and the doctrine of grace. “A lot of critics of Protestant ethics have said that it tends toward In a related essay, “Independent Reason, Faith, passivity or inaction,” she says. “But I want to say that and a Distinctively Human Wisdom,” Dr. Carpenter the Protestant, particularly Reformed, doctrine of explores how it can be helpful for theology and science grace implies its own social ethic.” Her 2019 work on to engage one another. You can read it online at this project was supported by a grant from the John spera.hope.edu/carpenter-essay

19 Hope College SPER A For This Medical Device, Paper May Be Just the Ticket

KENNETH BROWN, Ph.D. | PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY

A pricked finger, a drop of blood, a glucose level readout. The platform — the structural material of the strip — is key. It is the track for a relay race of sorts that brings The routine is familiar to anyone with Type 2 diabetes, glucose data from a drop of blood into a monitor to and a team of researchers at Hope is working to shake generate a legible readout. it up. Not the prick to the finger, but to the wallet. Blood carries all sorts of nutrients, including glucose, Over two months in mid-2019, Dr. Kenneth Brown around the body. Some individuals with diabetes don’t noticed that the price of diabetes blood-glucose test produce enough insulin to take that glucose out of the strips tripled. He’s been working for three years to bloodstream and into their cells, where it can be used reverse that trend. immediately for energy or stored for later use; for “Currently, the test strips are made out of plastic,” others, the problem is insulin resistance, which occurs Brown says. “What we would like to do is look at using when cells in muscles and fat don’t respond well to paper as a platform. That could significantly lower the insulin. Consequently, people who have diabetes must cost of the test strips. Some companies charge as much monitor their blood-glucose level and inject insulin — as $2 per test strip” — and patients require two per day. or take oral medication — to compensate. Brown hopes to reduce the unit cost to 5 cents.

CUSTOM BLENDS 20 Monitoring is a seven-second process that starts with insertion of a testing strip into a glucose meter. Next come a finger prick and application of a drop of blood to the testing strip. Glucose in the blood reacts with an enzyme that during the manufacturing process was applied to the strip’s polymer-coated platform; the enzyme triggers the oxidation of glucose, which releases electrons. The displaced electrons are transferred through the polymer coating to the strip’s end and “read” by the meter’s electrodes. The device displays the glucose level in numeric form.

“The significant breakthrough is that we can make our polymer coatings onto a paper-based platform,” Each test strip packs an impressive amount of Brown says. “The compound we’re using is not technology for a tiny, single-use object. “When you commercially available, so we synthesize a carbon think about all the different chemicals that are in the paste in our lab and that is applied to the paper. body, being able to detect glucose in the presence of all We then use electrochemical techniques to form these other molecules is a very challenging problem,” he polymer coatings on paper via the carbon paste.” says. “One of the goals is to make this process easier.”

Other scientists are working on different innovations, Brown’s project began with the polymer coating — the including a device that attaches to one’s arm or material on the test strip that allows for the detection shoulder and continuously monitors one’s blood-glucose and measurement of glucose in a drop of blood. The level, sending updates directly to a smartphone. The project evolved to tackle improving the detection drawback is that such devices work for a period of capability of the coating, create a paper based platform perhaps 10 days before the entire machine needs to be for it, and increase the durability of that platform. replaced—at a cost of about $100, substantially more than 10 days’ worth of test strips. “I do believe that the Brown has a favorite quote, familiar in Reformed work that we are doing could have a very significant circles: “Where your talents and the needs of the impact upon those who are in a place where these test world cross, there lies your vocation.” strips are a medical necessity,” Brown says. “When I read this, I think about the cross of Christ,” For 12 years, since receiving his diagnosis of Type 2 he says, “because the cross of Christ is an intersection diabetes, Brown has been one of those. His research between humanity and God. I think about the gifts may have saved his life; it certainly contributed to that God has given us; one of those gifts is knowledge. his diagnosis. “What really prompted me to go to the Every day, we are learning more and more about the doctor was that my students noticed what was going human body. That tells me about the infinite God we on,” he shares. Brown’s energy level was getting serve.” Serving God through teaching and learning, unpredictable; his clothes were getting baggier. working alongside student researchers, is a calling and His students connected the dots. a mission — one that Brown intends to have outlive him.

“My research would not be possible without my “My motto is: ‘Success without a successor is failure,’” students,” he says. “I don’t think of my students as Brown says. “And for me, that’s part of a faith working for me, but rather they’re working alongside dimension. Seeing my students go out and do me.” That partnership has resulted in a functioning much more than what I’ve done — seeing them prototype of a paper-based test strip, whose durability impact the world for good — speaks volumes of and functionality Brown and his student research what Hope instills within students.” assistants hope to improve. He envisions a strip that — By Natasha Strydhorst | Photos, Steven Herppich could someday be used for more than one glucose Read about Hope students’ role in Dr. Brown’s diagnosis reading, and for an even more accurate reading. at spera.hope.edu/brown-research

21 Hope College SPER A East and West, Body and Mind, T’ai Chi and Philosophy

ANDREW DELL’OLIO, Ph.D. | PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY

When Dr. Andrew Dell’Olio was a senior at Rutgers philosophy in the early part of the 20th century University, a professor there taught t’ai chi ch’uan in — Dell’Olio also has an abiding interest in Asian the campus square. Though Dell’Olio didn’t join in, he philosophy. “I think, in general, knowledge of other recalls observing the meditative martial art; he found it traditions helps illuminate one’s own tradition quite beautiful. Within a year, the budding philosophy and vice versa,” says Dell’Olio, who directs professor, by then a graduate student at Columbia, Hope’s Asian Studies program. had enrolled in a t’ai chi school founded by a senior Committed to disciplined training of both the student of Cheng Man-ch’ing, the man most responsible body and the mind, he has taught t’ai chi in Hope’s for spreading t’ai chi to the West. It was then that Wellness Program since 2007. Dell’Olio’s future blending of Western and Eastern philosophical priorities started to graft together. “T’ai chi helps one develop balance, mindfulness, sensitivity to others, gentleness, integration of emotion While his main professional specialties have been and thought, and harmony with the energy of the earth ethics, the philosophy of religion and the history of and divine source of this energy,” he says. “These are Western philosophy — especially the moral philosophy qualities that one aims for in moral self-cultivation.” of Thomas Aquinas, and the changes in Anglo-American They are qualities of the soul, or spirit, that Eastern and Western philosophies traditionally aspire to achieve, too. Dell’Olio made that the theme of World Philosophies, a class he developed with the support of a Mellon Grand Challenges Initiative grant and taught for the first time in 2019. He folded the practice of t’ai chi into the coursework.

As Hope’s philosophy professors prepared to host a fall 2019 conference of the Society of Christian Philosophers on the theme “Uniting Mind and Body: Cognition, Embodiment and Liturgy,” Dell’Olio began work on an article on t’ai chi and moral philosophy.

“The notion of ‘embodied cognition’ has caught the attention of contemporary philosophers. Drawing on recent work in both the philosophy of mind and neuroscience, philosophers are exploring the bodily dimensions of our mental processes, including our moral judgments,” he explains. “I hope to explore ways that the literature on embodied cognition can help us better understand how the practice of t’ai chi can assist moral development — and in turn, how t’ai chi can shed light on the nature of embodied cognition. It strikes me as a nice blending of both East and West, old and new.” — By Eva Dean Folkert | Photo, Steven Herppich

CUSTOM BLENDS 22 One Musician’s Global Mixology

MIHAI CRAIOVEANU | PROFESSOR OF MUSIC

Almost any instrument has the capacity to express a variety of musical genres: classical, jazz, folk, blues, Latin, pop. It’s a musician’s choices of style and repertoire that let the variation out. For instance, take the violin — or should we say fiddle? To differentiate them, don’t look; just give a good listen.

At the “Violin vs. Fiddle Gala Concert” at Hope College in 2019, in both a classical set and a fiddling set one virtuoso performer revealed the versatility of the violin. Professor Mihai Craioveanu was that fiddler, violinist, musician.

As all three, Craioveanu has been the impetus behind annual events in the Jack H. Miller Center for Musical Arts, like the standing-room-only “Violin vs. Fiddle” concert, that blend musical traditions, styles and performers from around the world. He does it, he says, “to give audiences a kind of synthesis of what it means to travel around the globe onstage.”

Since the Jack H. Miller Center opened in 2016, Craioveanu has brought a world of music to Hope by conceptualizing, organizing and then harmonizing for concerts funded by grants from the Hope College Patrons of the Arts, Cultural Affairs and Netherland- America Foundation. Each eclectic event features an unusual mix of people, instruments and repertoire. He started with “East Meets West on a Tango” in 2016; music requires: accordion, bandoneon, mandolin, guitar, moved on to “Bach to Broadway” in 2017 and “French piano, string bass, bouzouki, erhu, koto. He’s delighted Connection: 300 Years of French Music from Baroque that Masayo Ishigure, whom he describes as “perhaps to Jazz” in 2018; and for 2019’s “Violin vs Fiddle Gala” the best living koto player in the world,” will be among created a program of pieces inspired by jazz, tango, the guest artists participating in the Silk Road concert. bluegrass and the folk tunes of several cultures. Directing the musicians as they rehearse the diverse This year’s concert on March 23, “Playing the Violin pieces together for the first time is exhilarating, he says. on the Silk Road,” will feature music from China, “We do our due diligence in our home studios and then Japan, Armenia, the Middle East, Greece and Italy. we rehearse together here. They arrive at Hope one or “The ancient Silk Road was a land and maritime two days before the concert. That teamwork, that click trading route that started in China and then spread has to happen in 24 hours — no more than 48, that’s throughout the world,” Craioveanu explains. “The music for sure.” will feature the musical traditions from most of the — By Eva Dean Folkert | Photo, Steven Herppich countries that the Silk Road touched.” “Playing Violin on the Silk Road” will begin at 7:30 p.m. As musical director, he enlists renowned musicians to on March 23 at the Jack H. Miller Center for Musical collaborate with him on instruments as diverse as the Arts on the Hope College campus. Admission is free.

23 Hope College SPER A Mathematical Nature and Natural Math

BRIAN YURK, Ph.D. | ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF MATHEMATICS

On a table in his office in VanderWerf Hall, a popular got involved in the project when Murray sought help recent memoir about hiking the Appalachian Trail sits to unearth mathematical matrices that can explain the alongside Dr. Brian Yurk’s mathematics papers and rates at which gaps could close due to the growth of journals. The presence of each offers empirical evidence pioneer plants below. The goal of the research is better of how the applied mathematician’s love of nature is understanding of this natural dynamic. combined with his love for his work. Murray and Yurk track the number and size of gaps, He’s a backpacker, climber, skier, ultra-runner, and of different pioneer plants found in those gaps mountain biker, canoeist and a fan of Bill Bryson’s along five transect lines they’ve defined in the forest, A Walk in the Woods, and when he sees a mathematical each 500 meters long. “We look only at plants that are problem in the environment, he wants to solve it. within two meters of the transect,” Yurk explains. In much of his research, he applies mathematics “We look at any new gap that crosses the transects, too. to biology and geology: analyzing dune movement, There are actually ropes that Greg has out there and studying animal-population patterns and handling the then replaces every few years.” quantitative component of plant-succession surveys Employing those data, Yurk uses linear algebra to related to gaps in the Costa Rican rain forest canopy create a matrix model that extrapolates plant growth caused by wind or landslides. and reproduction and mortality rates to forecast future Yurk has been involved in that last project for nine population dynamics. “The mathematical theory allows years with Hope colleague Dr. K. Greg Murray, the us to make predictions based on the characteristics of T. Elliot Weier Professor of Plant Science. In the early this matrix as to what the long-term distribution should 1980s, Murray originated the research on gaps in the be,” says Yurk. rain forest canopy near Monteverde, Costa Rica. Yurk

CUSTOM BLENDS 24 The variables are many: sun exposure, air temperature, seed banks, soil nutrients and more. So the project’s complexity is ample, too. But asking and attempting to answer fundamental questions about how the rain forest works when gaps emerge is a driving force that keeps Murray and Yurk interested after all this time. In no way do they intervene in the forest’s growth, nor are they advocating for intervention. In fact, for a number of the areas they study, the more slowly the gaps close, the better it is for the plants and the animals who live in them.

“Those plants are important sources of food, particularly for birds and bats,” Yurk says. “And as such, they’re an important part of the food supply for every animal in the food chain in the rain forest. That’s why it’s important to understand what’s going on with and in these gaps.”

While the Hope duo has gathered data on site in the same five transects for a number of summers, Yurk is looking to expand their reach. He received a Michigan Space Grant in 2019 to use satellite imagery to identify gaps. “Instead of just working along these five lines, now we can work over the entire forest area,” he exclaims. “Then we’ll have more gaps that we can analyze and we can do a lot of it remotely.”

Yurk used the summer of 2019 to test his satellite concept by writing a computer program that automatically identifies canopy gaps in high-resolution imagery. First, he scoured satellite images for gaps with his own eyes; then he trained a computer algorithm to pick out the gaps that his human eyes saw. “The big remaining questions were these: If I’m identifying those things correctly visually, is the algorithm picking out the same gaps, too? Is there actually a gap there in the forest? On the other side of that, if the algorithm doesn’t identify a gap, is that right as well?”

Then he put it to the test in Costa Rica by hiking into 100 extremely remote locations, 50 of which had been identified by the algorithm as a gap and 50 of which had not. The results were encouraging. Of the 50 gaps that the algorithm picked out from the satellite imagery, he was able to confirm 47 visually from the ground. And of the 50 areas that the algorithm identified as not having gaps, at 47 of them he spotted no evidence of gaps as he gazed up from the rain forest floor. “So, what the algorithm was picking out was matching my visual identification, which was matching up in the field with a fairly high degree of accuracy,” he says.

Through every environmental and mathematical project, Yurk’s desire to study the natural world mathematically has interacted with his Christian views. “To understand creation — that’s always been an important part of how I think about my work,” he says.

In the coming years, with plenty of rain forest gaps to study and explore, Yurk will undoubtedly be able to think about math, nature and faith even more. — By Eva Dean Folkert | Photos, Steven Herppich and Dr. Brian Yurk

View more photos at spera.hope.edu/yurk-costa-rica

25 Hope College SPER A PREPARING TEACHER EDUCATION CANDIDATES TO CONNECT ACROSS CULTURES YOOYEUN HWANG, Ph.D. | PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION SUSAN CHERUP, M.A. | ARNOLD & ESTHER SONNEVELDT PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION

At Hope, the course Encounter with Cultures heightens teacher education candidates’ understanding of how ethnicity, culture and gender play out in day-to-day life. Later, when as teachers they relate to students whose lives can be radically different from their own, they draw on the critical thinking they learned about racism in America and the impact of the course’s array of cross-cultural experiences that took them into new, sometimes uncomfortable, contexts — from their first Chinese meal to experiences in a church or a neighborhood they might not otherwise have ventured into. Dr. Yooyeun Hwang has taught the class for 23 years, and Professor Susan Cherup for six.

Dr. Hwang: Future teachers need not just intellectual learning, but also a“ social experience to develop a moral understanding of human relations, which will motivate them to learn about others. It opens their eyes to how some people are more privileged — have more power or less power ­— more money – more opportunity.

Professor Cherup: For a Hope student who is neither Roman Catholic nor a Spanish speaker, attending a local Holland church which celebrates Mass in Spanish would probably be uncomfortable, not because it would be unwelcoming but because the student is inadequately prepared. These required ‘outside experiences’ will help future teachers in immeasurable ways. ”

Photo by Steven Herppich Hope College SPER A | MICRO ENTERPRISES |

Shifting Chemistry into Reverse

JEFFREY JOHNSON, Ph.D. | PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY

From the outside peering in, a great deal of organic Johnson and his student research assistants are in chemistry looks like salt and water: white powders search of methods that would allow them to break and transparent liquids. down the walls efficiently. “What our method would do is allow us to selectively take some cinder blocks Yet this branch of science is prolific in creating the out and then put in a window or that second court,” things we use every day — toothbrushes, medications, Johnson says. milk jugs and other ubiquitous consumer products. The field has built these things so well, in fact, that But why go to all this effort, simply to break something many of them are incredibly hard-wearing (such as down? At the microscale, the breakdown of products plastics that will hang around for centuries and drugs can be just as creative a process as their building-up. that cycle through waterways without completely A chemist who breaks a piece off a molecule is left breaking down). At the molecular level, the credit with two different molecules — and each one could goes to the stability of the carbon-to-carbon bonds be valuable. that hold these things together. “We’re not looking to make a specific product or a Usually, “organic chemistry is concerned with specific pharmaceutical,” Johnson says. “We’re looking building these bonds — not taking them apart,” to make a tool that other chemists can use as they’d notes Dr. Jeff Johnson. But his Hope College like.” Such a tool would allow scientists to rearrange research group is running in the opposite direction. molecules, chopping off a piece here and there to liberate completely new products. “The research that we do in the lab asks the question: How do we take carbon-carbon bonds and split them Johnson sees a particular value for this method in apart?” Johnson says. “Breaking carbon-carbon bonds the realm of drug development. is very, very difficult to do in any controlled fashion. Currently, if a molecule proves effective against a And even when you can do it, turning that molecule into cancerous cell line, it’s not always clear which part something else that could also be useful is incredibly is actively achieving that effect. “For a complex challenging.” If this bond-breaking were to become molecule, we have to make the right-hand side, and possible, however, useful products would almost we have to make the left-hand side, and test each of certainly result. them separately, which takes a lot of steps,” Johnson Johnson likens carbon-carbon bonds to the solid says. The alternative approach he envisions would structure of a cinder block room. “The framework be to simply chop the molecule apart and test each of a molecule is made from carbon-carbon bonds,” piece for the desired property. Technology that would he says. “It’s like an elementary school gymnasium, allow chemists to selectively extract pieces of larger in that it’s really easy to change the surface: You can compounds would allow the examination of many more put up posters, and you can paint it different colors. molecules in a shorter timescale, potentially increasing But ultimately, the walls of the gymnasium are still the rate of pharmaceutical discovery. the same. What happens if you want to expand the In the summer of 2019, Johnson’s team made substantial gymnasium and make room for a second basketball headway toward their goals of both measuring the rate court? You’d have to knock down a wall and push it of breaking those carbon-carbon bonds and developing out — and it’s almost impossible to do that without new ways to do it. It’s on these goals that Johnson and just building it from scratch. Essentially, organic his team are focusing in this research supported by a synthesis is like that.”

MICRO ENTERPRISES 28 three-year, $275,855 grant from the National Science “That’s always a challenge, particularly for beginning Foundation. students,” Johnson says. “The vast majority of things in organic chemistry are colorless liquids and white “Typically,” Johnson says, “the activation process goes solids, and we often work with very small amounts. through a certain pathway. Because we now know how Ultimately, it’s getting students to trust things besides that pathway works, we can figure out how to stop the their eyesight.” It’s about teaching — and learning — pathway partway through and create a new product new methods of observation, including the use of — or to get it to react with something else, and go in complex instruments that use infrared, radio waves a different direction.” On a relatively small scale, this or electrical current to provide information about is already happening. unseen molecules.

“We’ve proven to ourselves that we can do this,” “One of the major things that you learn as a research Johnson says. “But now, instead of getting 10 percent scientist is that it very, very, very rarely works how of the material to make the new product, how do we you expect it to,” Johnson says. “But when you’re get 90 percent?” The complexity of developing new pushing the envelope, you need to keep your eyes reactions that work with a wide variety of compounds open and your head up. A heckuva lot of failure is a perennial challenge for organic chemists. Making it goes into every success.” all the harder is the fact that Johnson and his student — By Natasha Strydhorst | Photo, Steven Herppich research assistants can’t visually observe these reactions, so their experimental process must rely Dr. Johnson talks about his research at on other methods of scientific assessment. spera.hope.edu/johnson-research

29 Hope College SPER A Investigating How Cells Recognize Good and Bad Fats

VIRGINIA McDONOUGH-STUKEY, Ph.D. | PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY

We may have to check the nutrition label to know “We have found quite a few of the proteins that work the amounts of saturated and unsaturated fats as part of the system,” McDonough says. “We know a we’re consuming, but for our cells, this tallying lot of the pieces; we just haven’t put the pieces together is second nature. Scientists have known for years into the puzzle yet.” A three-year, $246,972 National that cells absorb, process and use fats; that they Institutes of Health grant awarded in 2019 funds the can change saturated fats to unsaturated ones; and current phase of her long-term research. that they recognize the difference between the two. “I think people recognize that we’re really close to What remains a mystery is just how they make that being able to put those pieces together,” McDonough distinction. adds. “I’m hoping that in the next couple of years we’re That’s what molecular biologist Dr. Virginia going to be able to come up with some very nice models McDonough, a professor and researcher at Hope of how the system works.” since 1995, wants to find out. She and her students Models — specifically model organisms — have have been studying the way that cells recognize and already provided a substantial source of insight for respond to the presence of saturated fats (commonly McDonough’s lab (and for science more broadly). called “bad” fats) and unsaturated (“good”) fats. By mutating select genes in yeast — a common model McDonough’s research group is tantalizingly close to organism — McDonough and her team disrupt the understanding our cells’ approach to doing this and has ability of the cell to produce some specific proteins. identified some key components of that process.

MICRO ENTERPRISES 30 This makes that pathway dysfunctional and impairs the cell’s ability to metabolize fat. Once McDonough identified some of the proteins involved in the fat sensing/ regulating system, the next step was to disrupt them through this selective gene mutation and observe the results.

“We’re trying to study how the system should work normally,” she says. “We do that by probing it when it’s not working normally, and then figure out what’s gone wrong.”

When fat metabolism goes wrong in human cells, a whole host of disorders can follow. Obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and certain cancers are all linked to dysfunctional fat metabolism.

One of the things McDonough knows throws off cellular fat metabolism is a glitch in the so-called “chemical switches” that regulate the production of an enzyme — known in McDonough is occasionally asked, “Why not just study biochemistry circles as stearoyl-CoA desaturase — cancer? Why focus on the brass tacks way down at the that converts saturated fats into unsaturated ones. cellular level?” Part of the answer is that McDonough When functioning properly, the chemical switch (or has always been attracted by the intricacies of lipid switches, as the case may be) turns off production of metabolism. “I’ve always liked lipids. They’re sort of the enzyme when the cell has enough unsaturated fat. the neglected corner, but I’ve always found them really interesting,” she says. McDonough likens the process to a bucket brigade: “There are proteins that are recognizing something A bigger part of the answer is that much of what affects that has to do with the diet, and they’re telling other cancer cells — and, for that matter, patients affected by proteins, ‘There’s plenty of unsaturated fats; you should diabetes, or cardiovascular disease, or obesity — is still shut down expression of the desaturase — we don’t unknown. “Early on, nobody thought to look at glucose need it.’” Conversely, a second switch could tell other metabolism,” she says, “but once scientists did, we proteins to restart the desaturase expression when understood how these abnormal cells get their energy unsaturated fat levels drop. The switches, working to keep dividing. That may give us a clue as to how in alternate shifts, keep the cell’s lipid (fat) levels to treat this disease. You can’t just be focused on optimally balanced. translational things; you still have to continue the work on basic research.” “We know that [the chemical switches are] there, because we can see the effect,” she says. “We just don’t McDonough also focuses on training others in that know what they are or how they work.” To narrow the work. “I like people to know how important it is for search, she and the Hope students in her research group students to have the opportunity to do research, are targeting the beginning of the desaturation process. because this is the next generation of scientists, and “I’m pretty confident that there are switches early in they need to get their training started — the sooner the process, based on some of the previous work that the better,” she says. “Meanwhile, I feel like it’s really we’ve done,” McDonough says. “So we should be able to important for us to continue basic research that we find them.” Once found, these switches can be plugged do here, so that we understand how things work — into the lab’s burgeoning model of how the desaturation because that lets us figure out why they’re broken.” process, and the regulation of that process, work. The — By Natasha Strydhorst | Photo, Steven Herppich puzzle will be one piece closer to its resolution.

31 Hope College SPER A From Industrial Glitch to Research Focus

STEPHEN REMILLARD, Ph.D. | ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS

One engineer’s problem may just be another scientist’s “Plasma is sustained because electrons crash into atoms solution. At least, that seems to be the case with a curious in the gas,” Remillard says. “If the gas is really small, the physics phenomenon known as microplasma. electrons don’t get a chance to go so fast, so the collisions look different, and the entire physical property of the Dr. Stephen Remillard has seen it from both sides: plasma is going to be different.” as a problem during his earlier career as an industrial physicist, and as a surprisingly useful phenomenon now Some of these physical properties proved problematic that he’s a research-intensive academic physicist. when Remillard first encountered them as a member of an industrial team developing technology for a cell phone “Plasma is the fourth state of matter,” Remillard explains, base station. Microplasma caused the superconductors “and you can envision it as being hot gas, where electrons he was working on to malfunction. have been removed from the atoms.” “When you’re an engineer confronted with a problem, Microplasma is plasma on a miniscule scale. (Think very you look for ways to get rid of the problem. You don’t hot gases in very, very small spaces.) Electrons in the gas have a good reason to spend time studying it; that’s a reach a temperature of 4,000 degrees Kelvin, or about scientist’s job. When I was working in industry, developing 6,740 degrees Fahrenheit. The gaps in which microplasma products, my interest was getting rid of the problem,” he ignites are 10 to 20 microns wide, which is roughly 1 to 2 says. “When I came back to academia, where we’re more percent of a millimeter. As it turns out, the reduced size interested in that question of why stuff happens than we makes for completely different properties. are in how to build stuff with it, I had to shift gears.”

MICRO ENTERPRISES 32 Rather than eliminating microplasma, Remillard now creates, sustains and observes it in Hope College’s Microwave Lab in VanderWerf Hall. In 2019 his research group topped the $1 million mark for grants received over the years.

Though it may cause the occasional superconductor to stop working, in the right setting microplasma has a whole host of applications. It can be used in adaptive radio frequency systems, and to sterilize water in resource-poor settings. Scientists are even investigating whether it could speed up wound healing. (The extreme heat, wound patients would be relieved to know, belongs to only a small portion of the microplasma — its electrons. The majority of the gas maintains a more amiable temperature of about 68 degrees Fahrenheit.) The substance’s full applicability, however, remains to be studied.

“There’s a very limited understanding of plasma starting in very small places,” Remillard says. “That’s what’s neat about microplasma: everything we knew about macroplasmas has to be modified, and that’s what we’re working on.”

The Microwave Group at Hope is in year two of a three-year, $142,902 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. With this support, the Hope College group exchanges students with a professor at Grand Valley State University to study how microplasma is generated and what its electrical properties are.

The researchers generate and sustain microplasma using microwaves. Any microwave (like any other wave) has a specific frequency. Remillard and his students have found that when they ignite the microplasma with one of these frequencies, a completely different frequency of microwave energy comes out the other side — for reasons still unknown. “What is that all about? We’re trying to understand that.”

The phenomenon does have a name, though: harmonic generation. “It’s the exact same thing as guitar players talk about, when they talk about harmonic distortion of their amplifier,” Remillard says — albeit with sound waves.

Once ignited, microplasma is also visually different from macroplasma; it emits a different light, which can be altered by changing the microenvironment. “When we change the conditions of the microplasma — change the size of the gap, change the microwave power, change the pressure of the gas — the light that’s emitted changes,” Remillard says. “And I don’t know why yet. That’s a brand new area of research.”

Microplasma glows Remillard and the students involved in his research have inside a gap of one- discovered and characterized multiple previously unknown thousandth of an inch in aspects of microplasma. An early achievement was development a microwave resonator. of a model of how microplasma ignites in the first place.

Since then, Remillard reports, they’ve identified different behaviors that result under different levels of pressure. “We discovered that there’s a certain cutoff pressure, below which there’s no microplasma,” he says. “I’ve been told by people working in the field that this has been perplexing them — why they can’t get microplasma. Our model describes this perfectly.”

The next step will be to develop an even more sophisticated model that incorporates more of microplasma’s properties. The research is timely; the smaller that electronic and microwave devices become, the more an understanding of microplasma will be called for.

“As microwave devices shrank and shrank, it became a real nuisance or a real exploitable phenomenon, depending on the situation,” Remillard says. A whole new area of research opened up, all from a malfunctioning piece of cell phone equipment puzzled over during a previous career.

“It was accidental. It was unexpected,” Remillard recalls. “And that’s kind of how science works, a lot of the time: Somebody just says the right thing, and your light bulb goes on.” — By Natasha Strydhorst | Photo, Steven Herppich

33 Hope College SPER A Hope Goes Viral

BENJAMIN KOPEK, Ph.D. | ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY

While the fight against viral and bacterial human Viruses are typically more difficult to develop defenses pathogens stretches back to the dawn of human against than other pathogens, because they’re insidious history, on some fronts we have yet to mount an in a way that the others are not. Once a virus gains effective defense. At the nanoscopic level, viruses access to a host cell, it hijacks that cell’s replication have been infiltrating and using our cells with machinery to reproduce the virus’s own genetic impunity for as long as they and we have existed. material. Viruses become so inextricably linked to The battle against pathogenic bacteria that can the cells they’ve invaded that efforts to disable them sicken or kill humans turned the corner in 1948 are liable to harm the host cells as well. with the isolation of the first broad-spectrum antibiotic, so named because of its effectiveness against bacteria By studying how FHV behaves once it has invaded the of both broad classes (gram-positive and gram-negative). cells of fruit flies (which the virus is able to infect and But broad-spectrum anti-virals have lagged behind; kill), Kopek hopes to discover how FHV replicates itself, there are none on the market. what elements of the host cell it depends on for that replication, and how the viral reproduction might Yet. be stopped.

Molecular biologist Dr. Benjamin Kopek is working This could provide clues about how to stop other to change that. positive-strand RNA viruses that share FHV’s replication method. The positive-strand RNA class “The goal of our work is to eliminate or alleviate includes such notorious pathogens as hepatitis C, human suffering due to viral disease,” Kopek says. West Nile virus, Zika and yellow fever — the last A key to achieving that giant goal may lie in a tiny of which continues to kill 10,000 people each year, virus known as Flock House Virus (FHV). even though a yellow fever vaccine was introduced more than 80 years ago.

“What we’re mostly trying to understand is how it replicates the genome — how it makes more copies of its RNA,” Kopek says.

He and students in his Hope College research group know where replication takes place: in the cellular membrane. (If you recall high school biology class, you may also know it as the “phospholipid bilayer.”) Their research focuses on the lipid aspect of the membrane— the hydrocarbon molecules that are one of the membranes’ building blocks — because previous studies have shown certain lipids to be key components in viral replication.

“We can label the lipids and look at where they are “It’s one of the simplest models in the RNA class of relative to the virus replication factories,” Kopek viruses,” Kopek explains. “It works well for our research explains. (His research group labels lipids by attaching because it doesn’t infect humans.” It also works well fluorescent dyes, and then scrutinizes them under because it nevertheless belongs to the same class of microscopes.) “We can knock out cellular genes using viruses that constitute the majority of human, animal CRISPR to see how that affects virus replication.” and plant pathogens: positive-strand RNA viruses. Change to the cell’s environment or genetics is observed

MICRO ENTERPRISES 34 through the lens of how the virus (and its replication) assembly instructions — so other institutions could responds. Determining how FHV replicates in various build for $10,000 to $15,000 a device that, produced conditions could lead to better understanding of its commercially, would cost hundreds of thousands pathogenic cousins. of dollars.

“If we can find a common way that they all use to “It’s hopefully for the whole world,” he says. “That replicate, then we can potentially develop a drug against may not just be underdeveloped nations, but also that common target,” Kopek says. A drug against a undergraduate institutions or other specific labs that target common to Zika, yellow fever, West Nile virus might not have a whole lot of funding, but have a need and hepatitis C — and indefinite numbers of other for these types of technologies.” emerging and unknown viruses — is patently appealing. “The takeaway is that we need to support basic science Kopek is a Towsley Research Scholar, selected for a research,” Kopek adds. “It informs our ability to treat four-year Hope College program that provides funding human pathogens, and potentially deadly emerging and dedicated research time to promising researchers pathogens, that could really be a threat to human on Hope’s faculty early in their careers. He’s keen to health.” Likewise, anti-viral research must begin with support basic science around the world; it is, after all, the basics, uncovering the ways viruses operate in order where vaccines and pharmaceuticals get their start. to determine just how to stop them in their tracks. In that vein, a second major aim he pursues is making “We need to have ways to understand the basics of research more widely available. this virus class, because there are more viruses out Assisted by Hope engineering graduate Justin there than we’ll ever be able to develop vaccines Hanselman ’17, Kopek built the super-resolution against, or ever even know about,” Kopek says. fluorescence microscope that he uses for his research. “We need to do basic science research on this class As part of the growing open hardware movement, of viruses so that we’re prepared.” the two also developed a parts list and step-by-step — By Natasha Strydhorst | Photo, Steven Herppich

35 Hope College SPER A TWO MILES FROM CAMPUS, MEDICAL OUTREACH TO SENIORS BARBARA VINCENSI, Ph.D. | ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF NURSING

Years ago, when Barbara Vincensi’s work as a parish nurse took her to the homes of low-income senior citizens, it became clear to her that many would be healthier if regular medical monitoring were available to them close at hand. That unmet need stuck with her as she joined the Hope faculty and worked with students drawn to gerontology and community nursing. In 2015, Dr. Vincensi developed a nurse-managed wellness center at an affordable housing complex for senior citizens near the college. One morning a week, residents drop in for health screenings, exercise like chair yoga and balloon volleyball, consultation with Vincensi and with Hope nursing majors enrolled in her Community Health Nursing course, and an occasional community lunch that serves up nutrition education with each bargain-priced meal. Supplies provided by Hope’s Department of Nursing and grants from the Community Foundation of the Holland/Zeeland Area and the Perrigo Company Charitable Foundation have helped support the clinic’s work.

The students gain a different perspective on the elderly and on needs in the community.“ It definitely opens their eyes. For residents, the outcomes include decreased isolation and increased health literacy — and the higher the health literacy, the less likely they’re going to end up in the hospital with chronic disease issues. We assess how people are responding to their treatment. Are they taking medications correctly? Are they checking in with their doctors? We assess how they’re feeling; isolation is an issue. Mobility and transportation are big issues, too. A Meijer grocery store is across the street, but it could be across the world for them. ”

Photo by Steven Herppich Hope College SPER A | CULTURAL CURRENTS |

Telling Past Lives, Tracing Cultural Effects

NATALIE DYKSTRA, Ph.D. | PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH

In 2016, when Boston magazine ranked the “100 Best She outmaneuvered collectors with deeper pockets Bostonians of All Time,” Isabella Stewart Gardner came to purchase masterpieces by Titian, Raphael and in fourth — just behind John F. Kennedy and right before Rembrandt. Malcolm X. The wealthy, influential Gardner (1840– She was the first to design and erect a museum 1924), whose eponymous art museum is a Boston must- building specifically for a personal collection. see, transformed the city’s cultural landscape more than a century ago by being, as the magazine described her, She did so by being, in Dykstra’s words, “a savvy a “patron of the arts, maverick, feminist.” entrepreneur” and “incredibly smart.” She lived life on her own terms, no matter the cultural currents Dr. Natalie Dykstra spent 2019 in Boston immersed for women at the time. in research and writing for her biography of Gardner, which Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is to publish in “Isabella somehow was able to resist the messages, 2023. Gardner created an opulent, groundbreaking, spoken and unspoken, to not do what she was doing,” world-class art museum which opened in 1903 to be, Dykstra explains. “Sometimes I think people say, in perpetuity, “for the education and enjoyment of ‘Well, she was wealthy, so she could do what she the public.” In her will she directed that none of its wanted,’ but that’s not entirely the case. She was taking contents could ever be rearranged after her death. risks in doing what she was doing. She was stepping She stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her husband, the out of a prescribed role for women. And actually, those businessman and philanthropist John Lowell Gardner prescriptions for how to behave sometimes intensify Jr., and with revered figures of her day including with wealth. They become more elaborate. So, I think novelist Henry James, historian Henry Adams and she was very, very brave to follow something inside painter John Singer Sargent. Her strong vision, herself that was very powerful, even though that’s more opinions and work ethic catapulted her to a place of 21st-century language than she would have used.” social and cultural curiosity and acclaim. Even so, Dykstra says, “though Isabella’s legacy is feminist, it is Much of Dykstra’s research takes place at the Gardner misreading her to imagine her as a feminist in the way Museum Archives, the Massachusetts Historical that we understand that word today. She did not join Society and the Houghton Library at Harvard suffragette causes or social action committees for equal University. She also has retraced Gardner’s footsteps pay. Instead, she tried to change her world through the through Paris, Venice and Florence, and met on a arts and gave quietly to other causes that protected private island off the coast of Maine with descendants the most vulnerable in society: children and animals.” of the Gardner family to unearth new insights about her subject’s life. With each journey and conversation, In collecting for and establishing her four-story Dykstra becomes more and more impressed by museum, called Fenway Court in her day — a pursuit Gardner’s through-line from early loss (her only that lasted decades and took her on months-long trips child, a son, died at the age of 20 months) to triumph. to Europe and Asia to do her collecting — Gardner was “She had an extraordinary life, with great sorrow, a sometimes boisterous and always determined force too, but somehow that sorrow did not unmoor her. to be reckoned with in a male-dominated art world. Her capacity to enjoy life and her response to beauty She was the first collector to bring paintings by is what’s so memorable about her, and is why I’m Vermeer and Botticelli to the United States. drawn to her story,” Dykstra says.

CULTURAL CURRENTS 38 As are over 300,000 visitors to the Gardner Museum longevity and assuredness. While writing Clover annually. A younger generation is attracted to the Adams, Dykstra earned a National Endowment for maverick, “who was unapologetic about what she was the Humanities Year-Long Fellowship; in 2019 she doing,” Dykstra says. “The museum is popular with received another year-long NEH fellowship, this millennials. It’s packed on Thursday nights, when time a Public Scholar Award, for her work on the it’s open late. It’s like Thursday date night in Boston. Gardner biography. I think young women and men adore it. I think “The book about Clover was a kind of chamber piece,” they think she’s cool and strong and glamorous Dykstra reflects. “It was a ghost story, very intimate and distinctive. And I think they understand her and in a constrained time frame. Isabella lived twice as entrepreneurial spirit and the risks that she took.” long as Clover. And the way she lived makes her story This is Dykstra’s second biography of an elite Boston like a full-on orchestra backed up by many choirs.” woman. Her first, the Massachusetts Book Award — By Eva Dean Folkert | Photo, Matt Teuten finalistClover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life View images and learn more about the Isabella (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), tells the story of a Stewart Gardner Museum at photographer who struggled to find her way and met gardnermuseum.org — and visit for more on a tragic end when she took her own life at the age of nataliedykstra.com Dr. Dykstra’s upcoming book. 42. Gardner’s story is just the opposite for its subject’s

39 Hope College SPER A Sitcoms, Fake News and Collective Memory

CHOONGHEE HAN, Ph.D. | ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF COMMUNICATION

Dr. Choonghee Han believes every nation has a time in That pattern is more pronounced and brazen in its collective past that it would just as soon forget. East Asia, Han says; the South Korean and Japanese authorities rewrote, or in some cases omitted altogether In America, for example, it could be Vietnam. from the public record, memories of forced prostitution, “There have been lots of discussions and publications genocide and other atrocities that occurred as a result about the Vietnam War, how it was interpreted or of Japan’s occupation of Korea before and during World digested by the public through the media,” says Han. War II. (We might call it “fake news” today.) “It was a very painful chapter in this country. Before moving to America and entering academia, for Scholars have written that because it was painful, 12 years Han produced TV and radio documentaries we tried to forget it. For many, many years afterward, for the Educational Broadcasting System (EBS), people didn’t want to talk about it. We subscribe to South Korea’s equivalent of PBS. (He now chairs the concocted memory. We buy into it. That gives us a documentary division of the D.C.-based Broadcast very interesting human behavior pattern of forgetting Education Association.) That background helped fuel and remembering.” his present field of research: the media manipulation “Memory is never set in stone,” he declares. “It always of collective memory for political purposes. fluctuates. It’s messy and it’s dirty.”

CULTURAL CURRENTS 40 Over the years, Han says, the facts of what occurred But Korea was poverty-ridden, and culturally during the Japanese occupation of Korea have been and politically very homogenized, and also very replaced by “alternative facts” from political leaders authoritarian. So by going back and watching television who refuse to acknowledge events historians and others shows from that time I think I can discover how far around the world confirm as true. This pattern repeats the country has come, and remind people how they through different times and events; even during the were then, and how much they have learned or have 1980s, political turbulence erupted before Han’s eyes. lost over time. I think it’s going to be a very interesting investigation, because while they’re probably going “In the ’80s there was a coup d’état,” he recalls, “and to be kind of cheesy and corny, those stories are a the coup d’état regime stayed there close to 10 years. witness to something.” I was attending school at the time, and when I was a sophomore in 1987, there were huge street rallies.” Some American universities have collections of vintage During each military regime change in his native South Korean series, and there’s always YouTube. country, “the first place they go is the presidential However, Han suspects that when he takes his family palace, then to the TV stations.” to South Korea this summer, he’ll be spending several hours a day staring at screens. “The nice thing about He came to the U.S. from South Korea in 2003 and the national public broadcasting system is that they marks his 10th anniversary on the Hope faculty this were required to keep those programs,” he says. year, which means he’s both a participant in the Korean “They became part of the national archives.” diaspora, and a scholar of it. He was part of a team who presented a session on the Korean diaspora at the fall Han will also read vintage newspaper articles to see 2019 National Communications Association conference how the shows were received and promoted in their in Baltimore. While diaspora (which refers to any day. “There were soap operas, but not American or homogeneous group dispersed outside its homeland) is Latin American style where there are intricate personal most frequently associated with Jews or Africans, Han relationships between males and females,” he says. notes that “because of their tumultuous recent history “Korean soap operas of the past meant small details and geopolitical position, Koreans were either moved of people living their lives. It was a country rooted in out of their territories or voluntarily went to other Confucianism, though it is changing now, but adultery countries, and still do.” New sociocultural contexts or extramarital relationships were publicly demonized. may have enabled some to process and sift the mix So those stories were more likely a father admonishing of experience-based memory and stories crafted for his daughter for getting home late, or a docile wife political purposes that they carried with them. going against her husband. It teaches us how they tried to stick to their old rules while trying to adapt and In an offshoot of his research into collective memory, embrace the new.” Han is creating his own South Korean version of — By Jim McFarlin | Photo, Steven Herppich TV Land — studying television sitcoms and dramas from the 1960s and 1970s.

“I was intrigued by British scholars who went to BBC archives and started watching shows from that era,” Han explains. “Why? Because there were the Beatles— there was new thinking, right? There were cultural movements. They tried to see those cultural changes, then political changes, through the lenses of television programs. I modeled my new exploration based on that model.”

However, the social and political landscape was very different for South Koreans in that era, Han says. “It was still kind of rubble in the ’60s, remnants of the [Korean] war,” he says. “America and Great Britain To view the Korean Broadcasting System’s collection of were stable countries; households had cars and jobs. videos visit youtube.com/KBSArchive

41 Hope College SPER A Identity Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa

VIRGINIA BEARD, Ph.D. | ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

Dr. Virginia Beard was into identity politics long before the issue showed up on America’s front pages.

For more than a decade, she’s investigated how religion, ethnicity and gender influence democratic attitudes and behaviors.

In two papers finished in 2019, she lays out how religious identity affects attitudes toward democracy in some countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and how ethnic identity plays out in elections in Kenya.

Religious identity significantly influences both a demand for democracy and the rejection of its alternative forms, she argues in one of those papers, which wrestles with two research findings that at first blush seem contradictory. The first is that Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa are slightly (but statistically significantly) more likely than the region’s Christians to demand democracy. In documenting this point, Beard’s research contributes to the global conversation about whether Islam is compatible with democracy.

“A lot of that research uses countries in the Middle East, but there’s not much that looks at how Islam plays out in different parts of the world,” Beard says. “In sub-Saharan Africa, in countries like Senegal — which has roughly 98 percent Islamic adherents — they are extremely democratic relative to other countries in sub-Saharan Africa. So, yes, Islam is as compatible as any other religion to democracy. It might look different, but context matters.”

It’s her second finding that, when set next to the first, provides the head-scratcher: Muslims are also more likely than Christians to be open to autocracy in the form of military rule.

To unknot this puzzle of seeming incompatibility — expressed preferences for both democratic governance and military autocracy — Beard scrutinized the historical experience and context of nations where this finding surfaces. In addition to her own research in Kenya and nearby East African nations, she drew on data made available by the Afrobarometer Survey Research Project, a non-partisan research institution that conducts public opinion surveys in 18 African nations on topics including democracy and governance. (Beard worked on the Afrobarometer as a graduate student.)

When she first explored this question while developing her 2006 doctoral dissertation, the Afrobarometer was tracking four countries that had significant Muslim populations: Senegal, Nigeria, Mali and Mozambique. In two of them, citizens had witnessed the military stepping in to restore order to an ill-functioning state, holding control temporarily, and then transitioning to some form of democratic elections. In those nations, the seemingly inconsistent

CULTURAL CURRENTS 42 preferences persisted. In the other two, they did not. Afrobarometer data gets at whether a respondent identifies primarily with a nationality, or with an If individuals’ personal experience of their country’s ethnic group. For example, one question asks whether past demonstrated that military autocracy could lead a respondent feels only Kenyan; more Kenyan than, to democratic governance, Beard notes, then it follows for example, Kikuyu; equally Kenyan and Kikuyu; that people in that country might be sympathetic both to more Kikuyu than Kenyan; or only Kikuyu. democracy and to military rule (provided that the latter is expected to be provisional). “A lot of these show a waxing and waning of people feeling more Kenyan,” Beard says. For a time, it became “I reviewed the data to see if it holds over time that increasingly common for people to identify as Kenyan those ‘inconsistent’ preferences are found in people first, and less intensely with their ethnic group. That who live in countries where the military might have recently shifted, she reports; now, more Kenyans put actually worked in favor of democracy,” Beard says. “My the two on equal footing, or identify most deeply with argument is that it was their regime experience — how their ethnic group. the military could coalesce with a type of democracy — that meant they would allow for it provisionally. It’s not As Beard analyzes Kenyan media coverage, she actually inconsistent preferences, but the experience of includes opinion pieces and letters to the editor, how the military worked in democracy.” which she suspects may express people’s perceptions more accurately than journalists’ articles and reports The other paper Beard completed in 2019 examines the do. Many of the letters and op-ed pieces include role of ethnicity in Kenyan elections. She compared statements that reveal the persistent importance of quantitative Afrobarometer data to what the Kenyan ethnic identity: as Beard sums it up, “‘In my gut I’m media reflects about identity politics. both Kenyan and Kikuyu. But the one that gets me Of Kenya’s 42 ethnic groups, just a small handful a job or gets me arrested? That’s my ethnicity.’” — Kikuyu, Luhya, Luo, Kalenjin and Kamba — are Beard’s been amassing media samples and qualitative politically relevant, with allegiances and alignments information since 2014, when she spent two months that shift from election to election in a particularly in Kenya and had access to print newspapers. Back at Kenyan iteration of the universally relentless struggle Hope, she and a student entered her findings into a data for political power, Beard says — and to keep that set, and she resumed the analysis she’d begun in Kenya. power they “pull the ethnic lever to keep the masses She continues to add and analyze articles obtained from supporting one side or the other.” online editions of the newspaper.

She took advantage of an unrelated Great Lakes Colleges Association faculty study tour to Kenya in summer 2019 to gather additional information. “I get a better sense of things when I’m on the ground,” she says, “especially with things that don’t make international news but are reported on local Kenyan television or in print editions of the newspapers.” — By Josh Bishop | Photo, Steven Herppich

43 Hope College SPER A Can You Feel the Forró Beat?

CHRISTOPHER FASHUN, DMA | ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF MUSIC

The rhythms of Afro-Brazilian music still echo the ancient drumbeats of Africa — carried across oceans on slave ships, adapted across the centuries, and today encompassing both a distinctive cultural identity and a communal national bond.

Christopher Fashun (at right in photo) spent four months of 2019 in Brazil as a Fulbright Scholar, researching the dissemination of Afro-Brazilian music and culture in the coastal city of Salvador da Bahia and throughout Brazil.

“Salvador is widely acknowledged as the Afro-Brazilian capital of Brazil,” Fashun says. In Salvador, one of the largest cities in Brazil, around 80 percent of the population identifies as either black or of multi-ethnic ancestry.

From May through August 2019, Fashun, who directs the Hope College Brazilian Music Ensemble, immersed himself in Salvador’s Afro-Brazilian music and culture. He performed at an international percussion festival; worked with Jorge Sacramento, professor of percussion at the Universidade Federal da Bahia (Federal University of Bahia); and studied with Mestre Mario Pam, the music director of Ilê Aiyé, the oldest Afro bloco, or Afro-Brazilian carnaval block (as Brazilians call community centers).

“My Fulbright research resulted in a synthesis from opposite perspectives — academic through the lens of the university and then, with my colleague Mario, through the eyes of the Afro-Brazilian experience,” Fashun says. “I started to ask, How do the Brazilians share this musical culture? Because they share it not just within a city or a state, but throughout the nation. There are certain genres of music that are shared nationwide.”

“These Afro-Brazilian rhythms, which originate from the Afro-Brazilian religion candomblé, have made their way into popular music. Even if you're not from Salvador or the northeast, where these rhythms are more prevalent, people everywhere know it.”

One thing that is readily apparent — and markedly different from the United States — is that public school students receive no formal musical education. In the United States, most elementary school students spend at least a little time each week with a recorder or a triangle, but in Brazil, musical education (which is to say, the passing on of a musical tradition from one generation to the next) takes place entirely outside of the school setting.

So how do they do it? How do music and dance genres as culturally significant as samba and choro get passed along through particular cultures (like Salvador’s Afro-Brazilian culture) and into the national consciousness?

CULTURAL CURRENTS 44 Fashun attributes it to two main elements: festivals Núcleos Estaduais de Orquestras Juvenis e Infantis and social programs. da Bahia — in English, Nuclei of Youth and Children’s Orchestras of the State of Bahia). This method of Carnaval, of course, is the biggest Brazilian festival, teaching music to children is based on the Venezuelan the one everyone thinks of — but music is also a big El Sistema model for teaching classical music, and part of smaller festivals throughout the year. Fashun operates through music centers funded by the Brazilian was in Salvador for Festa Junina, a month of celebration government and private organizations. In addition to rooted in church festivals of the Portuguese colonial classical music, though, NEOJIBA teaches children era, celebrations of Santo Antônio (St. Anthony), how to play traditional and popular Brazilian music — São Pedro (St. Peter) and the nativity of São João and, especially in Salvador, Afro-Brazilian music. (John the Baptist). During June, people gather together in a series of small parties that can have the feel of a Experiencing firsthand these cultural festivals and family reunion; in rural areas it’s common for people government-approved cultural education programs to return to the places they grew up. reinforced for Fashun the importance of expanding music education beyond the classroom and into “It’s this celebration of three Catholic saints, but it’s communities, which is something he already was forró also rolled into this other form of music called , putting into action: Hope’s Brazilian Drumming which is really popular. You hear it everywhere. You Ensemble performs for educational assemblies hear the music in shopping malls, in restaurants, on the and other events throughout Michigan. And he radio,” he says. “These little kids hear the songs for the points out that the U.S. has its own version of Brazil’s whole month of June and probably even throughout government-sponsored “social project”: independent the year, because it’s just such a popular form of music.” American nonprofit organizations and cultural centers In addition to festivals, “music is perpetuated through that work to pass on traditional forms of music what they call ‘social projects,’” Fashun says, which intergenerationally. are government-approved cultural programs. The “In Salvador,” Fashun says, “they’re hitting it from entire Fashun family participated in them during their all different angles — culturally and through their stay in Salvador. “I studied drumming, my wife and I familial connections — to celebrate these things studied Afro-Brazilian dance with a teacher, and then that continue to unite them as a people.” my daughter and I did capoeira, which is a martial art — By Josh Bishop | Photos, Christopher Fashun developed by slaves.” Experience Afro-Brazilian choro music at Fashun was invited to observe a social project called spera.hope.edu/fashun-music NEOJIBA (an acronym derived from its full name,

45 Hope College SPER A LINKING RESEARCHERS WITH THE DIGITAL LIBERAL ARTS

VICTORIA LONGFIELD, M.S. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR and DIGITAL LIBERAL ARTS LIBRARIAN

As digital resources continue to change the face of research and teaching, Victoria Longfield helps Hope College faculty and students explore how cutting-edge tools can help them broaden and exceed their goals.

Her job title as Van Wylen Library’s digital liberal arts librarian is unusual even in this high-tech era. Hope is among just three American liberal arts colleges (with Grinnell and Middlebury) that dedicate staff or programs to growing the use of digital tools across all academic fields. Other schools’ “digital humanities” target just the subjects under that umbrella, fields such as history, philosophy, religion and literature.

“Softwares are developed, typically, for very particular niche subject areas,” Longfield notes. At Hope, professors in diverse fields are “taking those tools and finding new meanings for them in different places. An English professor might have a thousand texts on a given theme; how can we quickly analyze and disseminate that? Or another professor may want to take many events in time and display them in a way that conveys how they relate.”

There’s no need to explain that software does things quickly that might take a lifetime with paper and pen. What’s often less obvious, even to scholars, is where to begin. As faculty consult with Longfield to explore software options, digital scholarship methodologies or code for a research project, they may re-envision the process and what they’ll produce. TimelineJS, NVivo and Atlas.ti — to cherry-pick a few of the products available to Hope faculty and students — allow users to embed sophisticated content in a website, online timeline or other easily accessible platforms and create engaging presentations that can reach broad audiences around the world but just a keystroke away. Hope professors are using them to archive research, create podcasts of interviews, and build digital maps that correlate a topic with events and social movements that form its context.

46 SUPPORTING RESEARCH IN THE FINE ARTS

JESSICA HRONCHEK, M.A., MLS | ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR and RESEARCH AND INSTRUCTION LIBRARIAN

The upcoming production was Dance 43, Hope College’s annual faculty recital. Forty- seven student dancers were rehearsing with seven faculty and guest choreographers, and Jessica Hroncheck was the fly on the wall.

Hronchek spent weeks shadowing the dance company and interviewing choreographers to learn more about how people share information in a creative context — and how, as Van Wylen Library’s liaison to Hope College’s fine arts faculty, she can best support their work and understand their “information ecosystem.” She also shadowed the director, cast and crew of Hope’s production of Love and Information, Caryl Churchill’s play about communication in the digital age.

Research is a different ballgame when it builds toward non-text-based creative products. “Some faculty use textual and interdisciplinary resources extensively in their research and some use less. There’s often serendipity within the methods. A choreographer looking for inspiration for a new piece — that’s an iterative process of text-based research, and work in the studio, and creative exploration of their own, interwoven,” Hronchek says.

In consultation with faculty, Hronchek has expanded Van Wylen Library’s resources in the arts; recent acquisitions include Ontheboards.tv (a collection of contemporary dance and performance art) and the International Bibliography of Theater and Dance database. She helps faculty identify and leverage resources for campus creative events; for a 2018 theater production, for instance, she tracked down scores of 19th-century Russian folk songs so they could be integrated into the performance. To complement an exhibition in De Pree Gallery, Hronchek organized an exhibit in the library that drew on Van Wylen’s rare books collection, other print holdings and digital media.

“A certain nimbleness has to be there,” she says. “We need to go an extra mile to see that colleagues in any disciplinary area are truly heard and listened to — that library systems, processes and research methods support diverse approaches.”

Hope College SPER A | HIGHLIGHTED 2019 BOOKS AND CONFERENCE LEADERSHIP |

Deification in the Responsive Becoming: Moral Formation Latin Patristic Tradition in Theological, Evolutionary, and (Catholic University of America Press) Developmental Perspective (T&T Clark) Dr. Jared Ortiz (religion) edited this volume of In this examination of the doctrine of sanctification, essays about the doctrine of deification in the early Dr. Angela Carpenter (religion) draws on evolutionary Christian centuries. Deification is a vision of salvation anthropology, developmental psychology and which claims that believers can become “partakers Christian theology as she considers how moral of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) through union formation takes shape. Can human moral goodness, with Christ. Ortiz retrieves this doctrine which she asks, be received as a gift of God's grace? was thought not to be present in the Latin-speaking To learn more, turn to page 18. church. The essays cover the great figures of the early church, including Ambrose, Augustine and Jerome. Earthkeeping and Character Meet Dr. Ortiz at spera.hope.edu/ortiz-human (Baker Academic) Building on his book For the Beauty of the Earth, Dr. Steven Bouma-Prediger (religion) presents care Rostros (Evia Learning) for creation — earthkeeping — as an integral part This innovative second-year Spanish text is based of what it means to be a Christian. Exploring the on cultural content that engages students in reading virtues and character traits bound up in that task, and discussion about cultures in which Spanish is he encourages readers to reconsider how they think spoken. Lead author Dr. Daniel Woolsey (Spanish) about the natural world and their place in it. collaborated on the multi-media portfolio with Dr. Lee Forester (German) for Evia Learning, Honoring God with Body and Mind: a company that publishes language learning Sexual Ethics for Christians (Cascade) materials that build students’ cultural competency along with communication skills, so they can connect Informed by decades of conversations with students meaningfully with speakers of another language about sensitive topics about sex, Dr. Steven for the rest of their lives. Hoogerwerf (religion) takes a conversational approach to examinining questions on young Hear Dr. Woolsey describe Rostros’ cultural focus Christians’ minds. He invites readers into a at evialearning.com/rostros-2 life-long process of Christian ethical reflection.

BOOKS & CONFERENCE LEADERSHIP 48 Hindi Christian Literature in SECOND GLOBAL CONGRESS ON Contemporary India (Routledge) SPORT AND CHRISTIANITY From case studies, Dr. Rakesh Peter- October 2019 at Calvin University Dass (religion) develops insights about Yale theologian Dr. Miroslav Volf, Hope historian Dr. Fred Johnson, links between language, religion and Special Olympian Loretta Claiborne and pro athlete Tim Tebow politics, and documents how literature were among the keynote speakers at this conference co-sponsored of Hindi-speaking North India presents by Hope College and Calvin University. Hope’s Dr. Chad Carlson Christianity as linguistically Hindi, (kinesiology) and Calvin’s Dean of Education (and professor of culturally Indian and theologically kinesiology) Dr. Brian Bolt were the co-directors. Over five days, informed by other religions. 240 participants from 20 nations explored the mutual impact of belief and sport, and sport’s impact on faith and culture.

Saint Peter and the Goldfinch Listen at spera.hope.edu/carlson-bolt-podcast to (Wayne State University Press) Carlson and Bolt’s podcast Dig Deep: Sport, Faith, Life Imaginative, intimate meditations on everyday life, love and aging by UNITING MIND AND BODY: retired Hope English professor COGNITION, EMBODIMENT AND LITURGY Jack Ridl, a prolific poet. Former Society of Christian Philosophers Central Regional Conference U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins says September 2019 at Hope College the book “delights and surprises us Hope philosophy faculty organized this forum for presentations poem by poem.” by scholars affiliated with 29 colleges and universities. Speakers explored the relationship between mind and body, the ways we Surreal Expulsion experience embodiment, cognitive science, and wide-ranging related (The Poetry Box) topics including time loops, brain death and skeptical theism. Hope faculty members Dr. Joseph LaPorte, Dr. Greg Bassett, Dr. Jack In the wake of yet another mass school Mulder, Dr. Kate Finley, Dr. Kevin Kambo and professor and dean shooting, David James (English) penned Dr. Sandra Visser chaired six of the conference sessions. this chapbook of poems that respond to violence, injustice and what James calls Peruse the speakers’ abstracts at “political negligence” worldwide. spera.hope.edu/philosophy-abstracts

49 Hope College SPER A BRINGING AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE TO EASTERN EUROPE, AND VICE VERSA THOMAS SMITH, Ph.D. | DR. LEON A. BOSCH ’29 PROFESSOR OF MANAGEMENT

In 2013, Dr. Thomas Smith took a leave from Hope to spend a year at Emanuel University in Romania. Originally an underground college for pastors, it became a Christian university after the Soviet Union dissolved. Some students he taught there still seek his counsel as they grapple with how to live out Christian ethics in a business community that plays by different rules. In 2019, he visited Lithuania and Moldova to scout out opportunities for Hope students to experience life and the business world in the former Soviet bloc.

In Romania, if you want to get your business to the next level, you have“ to play the game, and that often means bribes. Young men and women from Emanuel going into business rise quickly and they very quickly run into a dilemma. If they say no to bribes, the company could go down, but if they say yes to keep the business going, they sacrifice their principles. That’s not something you and I in the United States have to deal with. It’s easy for me to say, ‘Well, of course don’t pay the bribe’ — but there’s way more to that decision than the simple black and white.

Our students need to experience something beyond a traditional semester at Hope College. We’re trying to find places that have a particular type of community where students can be exposed to and understand how all the dimensions of a community work. Some of these opportunities need to be in Eastern Europe, because that particular location and the nature of programs there will transform their lives. ”

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ON THE COVER A violin’s strings and fingerboard, key to the baroque . . . and bluegrass. Professor Mihai Craioveanu invites uncommon combinations of musicians to Hope College to collaborate in concerts that span genres and musical cultures. Read more . . . page 23

Browse the Hope College fine arts events calendar at hope.edu/arts

IN THIS ISSUE Learn about more than two dozen Hope faculty members’ writing, research, artistic endeavors, and impact beyond the campus. Table of contents . . . page 4

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